The Cost of Freedom...

To help make this introduction make sense, I want to inform you that my current job is working for the certain hospital in their mental health ward.


It is interesting to tell people about what I do for a job. Different expressions ranging from appreciation to concern to the most common reaction of shock and wonder. Sadly, my explanation is often equally as varied as the responses of my listeners. I they they respond in reverence, I explain with equal reverence. If they respond in humor, I then explain in an equal sense of humor. Is this right? No. No it's not. It's not right because it does not give honor where honor is due. It's not right because it does not properly explain what I feel about the place I work.

I work with veterans, men and women who at some point in their lives decided that this country was worth their lives. I see patients who were shot in the head and have sense lost the mental capacity to function normally in society. I see patients who are homeless and have lost their families, their homes, their jobs, and all because they're mentally unstable. I see patients who are drug addicts, alcoholics, lesbians, gays, straight trans-genders, suicidal, homicidal, violent, people who hate God and people who think they are God. But the, hands down, number one symptom I witness in people who come in as my patients has to be depression. Debilitated by their own sense of worthlessness they have ceased to have any tangible value of life. Their loss was given when they're loved ones gave up on them. Their brokenness was when the nation they served betrayed them and rejected them as people. Their scars did not come from a grenade or the devastating blow of a piercing bullet, but by a knives edge carving its mark in the wrist of a broken veteran. The war is never over, ever-repeating itself in ways unnoticed by the general public. The "crazy" homeless man yelling at himself wanders the streets of Portland with no wheelchair capable of supporting a paralysed mind. This is the cost of freedom.

There was another cost for an entirely different freedom...

Being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground(a).He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, and familiar with suffering. Like one from whom men hide their faces he was despised, and we esteemed him not. He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. He was wounded for our transgressions; He was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the punishment that brought us peace, and with his stripes we are healed. He was oppressed and afflicted, yet he did not open his mouth; he was led like a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is silent, so he did not open his mouth. By oppression and judgment he was taken away. He was assigned a grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death, though he had done no violence, nor was any deceit in his mouth(b). They stripped him and put a scarlet robe on him, and then twisted together a crown of thorns and set it on his head. They put a staff in his right hand and knelt in front of him and mocked him. They spit on him, and took the staff and struck him on the head again and again(c). He carried our cross up a hill where the soldiers drove nails through his hands and feet, he hung there until he died and to insure his death a guard pierced his heart through his side with a spear. There is no doubt that he was dead.

And to prove that his sacrifice was acceptable to God, the Lord raised Jesus back from the dead, arguably the most important truth in all of Christianity.

This is a different, more excellent and most desireable freedom, that only comes through faith in the very death and resurrection of the God who went through all of that to put His love on display for mankind and the salvation of all who will believe.

Freedom cost God everything-- and me nothing-- so that I might have everything and forever be with God.

Thank you Jesus,


(a) Luke 22
(b) Selected verse of Isaiah 53.
(c) Matthew 27